News Archives

Geeks 3D has a great overview of the new OpenGL and Vulkan features in the AMD Adrenalin 17.12.1 release. AMD has added some OpenGL 4.6 extensions (GL_ARB_gl_spirv) but not all, so Adrenalin 17.12.1 is still an OpenGL 4.5 driver with OpenGL 4.6 features. This driver exposes 319 OpenGL extensions (GL=294 and WGL=25) for a Radeon RX 470 on Windows 10 64-bit. Adrenalin 17.12.1 also exposes Vulkan 1.0.65 which is one of the latest specifications. Vulkan support has been added to Radeon Overlay, Radeon Relive, Enhanced Sync and Frame rate target control.

Neil Trevett, Khronos Group President and Radhakrishna Giduthuri, Software Architecture and Compute Performance Acceleration at AMD, spoke at two Khronos related events this past week. Neils presented was an update on the Khronos Standards for Vision and Machine Learning which covered Khronos Standards OpenVX, NNEF, OpenCL, SYCL and Vulkan. Radhakrishna presented Standards for Neural Networks Acceleration and Deployment covered Khronos Standards OpenVX and NNEF. The slides from both presentations are now online.

There is a wide range of open-source deep learning training networks available today offering researchers and designers plenty of choice when they are setting up their project. Caffe, Tensorflow, Chainer, Theano, Caffe2, the list goes on and is getting longer all the time. This diversity is great for encouraging innovation, as the different approaches taken by the various frameworks make it possible to access a very wide range of capabilities, and, of course, to add functionality that’s then given back to the community. This helps to drive the virtuous cycle of innovation.

Join Patrick Cozzi and his Penn graphics students final project presentations in a live stream December 11th at 5pm EST. There will be 19 4-minute presentations in total. Topics include rendering clouds, terrain, ocean, forests, weather, VR, voxels, ray marching, and more. A complete list of projects can be found online here.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the finalized SYCL 1.2.1 specification. SYCL for OpenCL enables code for heterogeneous processors to be written in a “single-source” style using completely standard modern C++. The multi-vendor SYCL 1.2.1 standard is available royalty-free for industry use, and the full specification together with details about the SYCL open-sourced conformance test suite and Adopters Program are online.

The first two Khronos meet-ups coming up will both be in London. First up is the Khronos UK Game Dev Social on December 7th: "Meet developers working on Vulkan within Arm, Google, Imagination, Samsung and many more! Share your experiences with others in the graphics & game tech industries." The second is a Khronos London Chapter meet-up on December 12th: Come and hear speakers from Away3D, Arm, KDB, Unity and Intel talking about Vulkan, SPIR-V, OpenCL and of course WebGL. Back in the US on December 13th is the Khronos Boston Chapter meet-up covering the latet on Khronos APIs. Finally over in Sydney Australia will be the Khronos Sydney Chapter meet-up "Graphics XMAS Meeting in Pub (Art + Science + Design + Engineering)." All events require registration.

The Khronos Group was at SIGGRAPH Asia this year with talks from several Khronos members including NVIDIA and Unity, as well as a talk from the Khronos Melbourne Chapter Leader. Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, gave an overview of the Khronos ecosystem. If you are interested in learning more about Khronos standards for 3D, VR, AR and Neural Networks, be sure to take a few minutes to read Neil's presentation.

Khronos held an OpenXR panel at the 2017 VRDC session (GDC) with developers Yuval Boger, Joe Ludwig, Kaye Mason, Paul Pedriana and Nick Whiting. The panel provided new updates on the goals, content and status of the effort to create a widely accepted VR API for developers called OpenXR. Learn more about OpenXR or watch the video on Youtube.

The Khronos London Chapter is holding a Christmas Extravaganza with a great line up of speakers and lots of door prizes. Speakers included from Away3D, ARM, KDAB, Unity and Intel. Food and drink will be served. Space is limited to 60 people and the event is already half full. Register today!

The Khronos Group Vulkan API v1.0.66 has been published on Github. This latest update includes three new extensions: VK_EXT_external_memory_host, VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf and VK_EXT_queue_family_foreign. Several bugs published in the public Github issues tracker have been resolved as well as some internal issues.

Codeplay has set out its intention to lead the development of guidelines to ensure that standards like OpenCL and SYCL meet the strict safety requirements for a range of industries by leading the Khronos SCAP. Illya Rudkin, Principal Software Engineer at Codeplay, is now leading the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Panel and continues the work done by Erik Noreke to establish the panel. Erik was a long time member of Khronos and well respected for his leadership in numerous working groups. On his appointment Illya said "My role is to continue the work by Erik and grow the participation of both Khronos members and external safety experts within the group. I also hope to enable the group to bring current and new open standards into the safety domain. The demand for safety critical software is growing and we have to ensure adopters of our standards can implement complex systems, often involving multiple layers, as efficiently possible with minimal concerns to safety cases." Learn more about the goals that Illya has for The Safety Critical Advisory Panel. Please contact Khronos if you would like more information about becoming a member, or joining and advisory panel.

The Khronos Group announces an updated Adopters Program for OpenVX, the open, cross-platform, royalty-free standard for computer vision and inferencing acceleration. The updated OpenVX Adopters Program includes a new version of the full conformance tests for the latest iteration of the standard, OpenVX 1.2, and the process by which Adopters can run those tests and submit the results for working group review. Once these tests are successfully passed, Adopters are enabled to label their product as OpenVX conformant, use a royalty-free trademark license for the OpenVX name and logo in association with their implementation, gain protection from the Khronos IP framework and enjoy marketing promotion from the Khronos Group.